Eli Roth: Interview with a Basterd

The man who plays Sergeant Donny Donowitz alongside Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds talks to us about baseball bats, the Basterd life, and more in this extended interview for Esquire.com

Also Known As:
The director of Cabin Fever and Hostel (parts I and II).

But in Basterds he plays:
Sergeant Donny Donowitz, aka the Bear Jew — "and not because he has more chest hair than Robin Williams. He's a Jewish guy from South Boston who carries around a bat, and his whole thing is he's gonna beat every Nazi to death with it. He doesn't want to scalp them, he doesn't want to shoot them. He wants to feel their skulls crack through the bat."

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What Else, Eli, Can You Tell Us About This Bear Jew?

"The Basterds kind of keep him in reserve, so that when they're interrogating the Germans, they're like, 'You'd better tell us where so-and-so is hiding, or we're bringing out the Bear Jew.' The idea's that when you hear the "Bear Jew", you think it's going to be some 300-pound, huge 6-foot-7 muscle guy, and Quentin said he wants people to go, 'That's the Bear Jew? Eli?' "

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How He Got the Part:

"In December of 2004, Quentin invited me over to his house. He read the script for Hostel, and he said, 'This is great, but I think we can make it better.' So I just went over to his house, and we went through the whole script and we were like drinkin' margaritas and writing, and at the end of the day, he said, 'You want to hear some of Inglourious Basterds?' And I figured maybe he had a scene or two written, because you know this was right after Kill Bill 2. He read me the entire second chapter and I was mesmerized. It's what I call Quentin Tarantino Theater. It was like Quentin Tarantino radio theater. He performed every single part and he really changed his voice. I had no idea he was that skilled as an actor. He was incredible as Hitler. I was just in awe, and I always hoped he would finish it. So I knew about the Bear Jew, and he said, originally, I'm thinking Adam Sandler would be great for this, and I thought it would be so great to see Sandler as a badass, beating Nazis to death. And I know he can really do the Boston accent. And I said, 'Quentin, did you know I had a baseball bat in my car growing up?' I mean, that's a real Boston thing. You have a baseball bat and most of the time you use it off the field. He said, 'No, I just thought of it.' It was just something that just came to him, something he was in tune with. Over the years, he had hung out with me enough and heard enough of my Boston stories, and he said, 'Now when I'm writing Donowitz I'm starting to hear your voice.' So he hinted that he was thinking about having me do it.' "

A Bear Jew's Work Is Never Done:
"I said to Quentin, 'Look, if I'm going to be in Berlin for six months, let me direct something. I'll do it for free, I'll do it uncredited.' He said, 'There's this movie within the movie — a Nazi propaganda movie called Nation's Pride — and it's all about the power of the swastika and the glory of Germany,' so he said I could shoot that. It was brilliant of Quentin to have the Jew do the propaganda movie. I wasn't going to play it safe, and I wasn't going to pussy around."

Future Plans?

"I'm finishing two screenplays. One is a sci-fi movie called Endangered Species — it's kind of in the vein of Cloverfield — and right after that, I want to shoot Thanksgiving, a full-feature version of my slasher trailer from Grindhouse. I want to make it the highest-body-count holiday slasher film in history. Ten years from now, I want people to be like, 'I can't think of Thanksgiving without that image of the human body on the dinner table stuffed like a turkey. Eli Roth ruined it for us.' "